CognoscentiCognoscentihttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org
Boston is a city of thinkers. Of innovators. Of opinion makers and thought leaders. WBUR is tapping into this extraordinary community — gathering a distinguished group of contributors who will share their best ideas and most insightful perspectives on Cognoscenti, our new opinion page.Wed, 14 Jun 2017 21:11:52 +0000en-UShourly1Immigration: What Barbara Jordan Could Teach Donald Trumphttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/immigration-mexico-trump-rich-barlow
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/immigration-mexico-trump-rich-barlow#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:35:23 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34622I recently found the first Trump supporter among my acquaintances. She said Trump isn’t a bigot; drug-dealing Mexican immigrants really are the source of our addiction scourge. I pointed out that immigrants commit fewer violent crimes than native-born Americans and that our appetite for drugs also shoulders blame for addiction. An immigrant herself, my acquaintance has no problem with foreigners coming here legally; it’s those who sneak in that Trump is targeting, and about whom Barack Obama is indifferent, she alleged.

I noted the president actually has been vigorous against illegal entries. When she interjected, “And he’s a Muslim,” I realized she’d gone full moon on me and gave up.

Which prompts this plaintive prayer: Where have you gone, Barbara Jordan?

To the beyond, sadly. The late Democratic congresswoman, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as a member of the committee investigating Watergate, was a reliable liberal; as a black woman, she knew what it was like to be part of a marginalized population. In the 1990s, she led an immigration reform commission that recommended a reduction in legal entry quotas and tighter border controls. Given Trump’s concerns about immigrants, he and Jordan might have shared a common frame of reference. He certainly could have learned from her model of reasoned, respectful thinking on this combustible issue.

Like Jordan — a Boston University-trained lawyer who carried a copy of the Constitution in her purse — and like President Obama, I believe immigration limits should be enforced. It demonstrates that we are a nation of laws and that we will be fair to immigrants who play by the rules and wait in line legally. (My Trump-touting acquaintance stressed that latter point, though as a white woman recycling myths about a president and immigrants of color, I suspect she’s unconsciously anxious over a country that’s shedding its white-majority status. There’s ample research suggesting other whites are discomforted.) Liberals who damn Obama’s deportations may sound as if they’re indifferent about the law to people like my acquaintance.

But beyond border enforcement, Jordan’s commission unsuccessfully advocated a one-third cut in legal immigrants. It must be said that commissioners (and Trump voters) labored under the misimpression that immigrants “steal” jobs from native-born Americans. The concern makes superficial sense; there are only so many jobs to go around, right? But today, most economists agree that’s not true. As a New York Times article put it, “Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor … they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones.”

A study of the 1980 Mariel boatlift of Cubans to the U.S. corroborated that insight, The Times said. While 45,000 working-age Cubans flooded Miami, raising the labor supply 7 percent, there was no significant decline in wages or employment. The logic of the research, The Times writer argued, suggests that we could raise, dramatically, the roughly half a million immigrant visas we grant each year, perhaps in steps to gauge the effects and be sure we weren’t losing jobs.

Given all the benefits of immigration, the writer’s suggestion seems sensible to me. Who knows whether Jordan, who died in 1996, would have agreed? But we do know a few things. She opposed denying automatic citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, declaring, “To deny birthright citizenship would derail this engine of American liberty.”

So far as I know, she didn’t advocate walling off the border with Mexico, nor did she fantasize that we could persuade that nation to bankroll such a project. She didn’t slander immigrants of any nationality as “rapists.” It’s impossible to imagine her criticizing an American-born judge as biased against her based solely on his Mexican ancestry, as Trump did with the jurist presiding over the fraud case against Trump University. Of course, having never demonized a group of immigrants, Jordan wouldn’t have had to worry about such bias in the first place.

We know, in short, that Trump could have chosen a more intelligent, less xenophobic vocabulary to discuss immigration by following Jordan’s cue. But we also know that wasn’t in the cards; Jordan venerated the law, while Trump has skirted incitement-to-violence charges because of his tumultuous rallies. You have to wonder whether The Donald someday might be the object of the question, “Will the defendant please rise?” That’s his biggest difference with Jordan.

]]>2016-06-09T13:35:23-04:00Massachusetts’ Potholes, And The Pitfalls Of A Proposed Tax On Millionaireshttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/massachusetts-millionaires-tax-tim-snyder
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/massachusetts-millionaires-tax-tim-snyder#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:34:13 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34684As you wait in long airport security lines this summer, think of the poor legislators you’re leaving behind, hard at work on Beacon Hill. One hopes that, as they consider the Millionaire Tax, they’re thinking of you in that interminable line, too.

Supporters seek to soften the blow of House Bill 3993 (known as the Millionaire Tax) by assuring that the funds raised by the additional tax on incomes over $1 million will be used for noble purposes: education and infrastructure.

We’ve heard similar assurances before, and yet, here we are, in line. Which reminds me: Soon after 9/11, Congress established the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and levied a fee on all airline tickets to pay for it. Proceeds from the Aviation Passenger Security Fee (then only $2.50 each way) were “to pay for the costs of providing civil aviation security services.”

After 12 years of relatively safe air travel, fears of debt ceilings and shutdowns supplanted those of hijackings and bombings. In the 2013 budget compromise, Congress more than doubled the fee from $2.50 to $5.60 per leg, but allowed money collected by these fees to be redirected to the general fund to pay other bills.

This fee currently brings in $3.5 billion annually. Yet, passengers still contend with long lines to be screened. One airline reported that 70,000 passengers this year were still in line when their flights took off without them.

The TSA isn’t blameless. After all, their spending has been questioned in the past. In 2014, they spent $1.4 million for an iPad app that did nothing but direct passengers to the left or right lane. It amounted to all the technical wizardry one might glean from the first lesson of a computer programming class. But there is no question that the steady decrease in funding, from $7.8 billion in 2012 to $7.3 billion in 2015, has meant problems for hiring, training and retaining employees.

This is the example to keep in mind when considering the proposed Millionaire Tax.

Like Congress then, the supporters of this tax have noble goals. The need for new investments in school and infrastructure is as urgent now as the call for heightenedsecurity was after 9/11. Butjust like the Aviation Passenger Security Fee, there is no way to guarantee thatthe money raised by the Millionaire Tax will go to education or roads, no matter how noble the intentions.

And then there’s this key phrase, included in the bill: “subject to appropriation.” It’s what makes this bill constitutional. In Massachusetts, the power to appropriate or spend money rests with the legislature. It cannot be subject to referenda, like the one proposed.

This caveat is also what makes the future of the plan unknowable. You can suggest, beg, or pinky-swear that the money will go where you want, but in the end, it’s nothing more than an unenforceable promise. Just as Congress saw fit to reallocateTSA fundsto other priorities, the Massachusetts Legislature could do the same thing. It’s their prerogative, and it’s what we elect our representatives to do.

I believe the supporters of H.3993 mean well. But, this summer, as you stand in line for a pat down while your flight to paradise leaves you behind, remember that the best laid schemes of mice and men — including legislators — go oft awry.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:34:25-04:00Our Goldfish Looks Depressedhttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/animal-cognition-and-pets-rich-barlow
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/animal-cognition-and-pets-rich-barlow#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:33:17 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34186One dog, two cats, a gecko, a frog and a goldfish: Our home could have given Noah a run for his money as an animal caretaker. I like pets as much as the next guy, but our 11-year-old’s soft spot for creatures came with a naturalist’s fascination with life forms. “No more pets,” I’ve pleaded over the years, only to come home to a new family member — warm- or cold-blooded, it made no difference. We even had a praying mantis, until it passed on to that great leaf pile in the sky.

So damn Jessica Pierce. Thanks to her, I’ve recently endured multiple trips to the pet store, headaches over pet contraptions, and a two-thirds increase in the organisms under my roof. And it was all my idea, the result of a guilty conscience pricked by Pierce and the latest animal cognition research. Therein lies a moral.

Pierce, an independent scholar and bioethicist, wrote a piece in The New York Times earlier this month about our deepening awareness of, well, other animals’ awareness. It’s hardly news that advanced species are sensitive and can suffer; that’s why the government is discontinuing unnecessary medical research on chimps, and why public pressure led Ringling Bros. to announce it will free its elephants, and Sea World to stop breeding orcas. I also knew that seemingly simpler animals show surprising intelligence. Octopi and squid can unscrew a lid; a striped bass hooked by an angler may wrap the line around a rock, knowing it could shear when the fisherman tries to reel in his catch.

But when Pierce suggested that goldfish are likely more sentient and capable of suffering than we assume, I winced. For seven months, we had kept Azetiki in solitary confinement in an unadorned fishbowl less than a foot in diameter. I couldn’t get over Pierce’s own confessional: “The more I’ve learned about goldfish — they are more intelligent than we think, feel pain and engage in socially complex behaviors — the guiltier I feel that I subjected several of these creatures to a life of endless tedium, swimming circles in a small bowl on my daughter’s dresser.”

I stunned my wife and the babysitter by proposing that we get a bigger home and a companion or two for Azetiki. Kieran welcomed the idea, however, and I thought it would be a great father-son bonding adventure, so we headed to the pet store.

Our goldfish had survived with simple care — regular water changes and purifying — so I assumed the same drill would work with larger quarters. Of course, I was wrong; a tank requires a filter, among other accessories. After lugging a tank set home, we read the filter instructions, and it seemed to be missing parts. I raced back to the store, only to be told that most of the filter had been pre-assembled.

That was a relief, until we realized we’d lost the fish care brochure. At the risk of a stalking complaint from the fish saleswoman, I trekked a third time to the store for a replacement. Then the filter went on the fritz. By now, I was cursing what seemed to be one of the dumber ideas of my tenure on earth. My wife, a patient and intuitive tinkerer, spared me a fourth trip and got the filter bubbling happily again.

Kieran had to make several more pet store runs with the sitter to test the tank water’s quality before we could populate it. Finally, Azetiki was introduced to his new home, along with four new companions, plants, and the equivalent of a piscine playground—tubes and figures to swim through and around, to make life a little more interesting.

The moral? For years, animal rights activists have futilely denounced everything from inhumane treatment of factory-farmed animals to the cruelty of keeping certain advanced species in captivity. They’ve largely been ignored. But the corporate and government actions to free animals mentioned above demonstrate the activists were right. Yes, some animal lovers seem to think human welfare doesn’t take priority. But smart ones don’t.

They merely insist that any person considering herself moral or progressive shouldn’t exhibit the same cluelessness she mistakenly attributes to animals, but rather pay attention as science expands our understanding of nonhuman minds.

Meanwhile, Azetiki and company seem to be thriving, insofar as I can judge fish-ly contentment. Tank care remains a bit of a hassle, but our family members all pitch in. Jessica Pierce made life a little more complicated. But she’s made my sleep a lot easier.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:33:17-04:00A Pilgrim’s Journey: Confronting Sin And Finding Grace At Emanuel AME Churchhttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/pilgrimage-mother-emanuel-church-charleston-shooting-mark-edington
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/pilgrimage-mother-emanuel-church-charleston-shooting-mark-edington#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:32:03 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34614The pilgrim’s journey is a shared experience of many religious traditions. Most of us know of the pilgrimage to Mecca that faithful Muslims hope to make at least once. A visit to Jerusalem three times each yearwas a feature of ancient Jewish tradition, and the faithful still visit the Western Wall of the Second Temple. Hindus have dozens of pilgrimage sites across India; Sikhs visit the birthplace of Guru Nanak in Pakistan.

Christianity, too, has its traditions of pilgrimage, many of them focused on witness of martyrs. Down through the ages, pilgrims seem to have been drawn to places where the blood of faithful innocents has been shed. If you ever read the Canterbury Tales, you read a fanciful collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims headed to the place where Bishop Becket was murdered in his cathedral for standing up to King Henry II.

I suppose that was something of the urge that found me in Charleston, South Carolina, this past November. I was in the city for a meeting, but I remained for a Sunday so I could attend services at Mother Emanuel Church, the place where Pastor Clementa Pinckney and eight members of his congregation were murdered as they gathered for a Wednesday-night Bible study.

What struck me most deeply about that place of worship was the sheer joy of the people whose home it is — a joy that is, perhaps, the greatest defiance possible to the human hatred that brought death through their doors. There was no mention of the atrocity that had taken place within those walls, at least not by the people whose church it is; no act of remembrance for the dead, no anger or bitterness. Those of us who came as pilgrims all sat in the back pews, not quite knowing how to be there but knowing that we had to be; we were made to feel profoundly welcomed and included, acknowledged as the seekers we were.

I wouldn’t have been surprised by words of bitterness in the preaching or cries for vengeance in the prayers. But I heard none of that. Instead, I was invited to join their prayers for healing and reconciliation. I heard a classic three-point sermon about the power of love to replace hatred with hope in the human heart. And on what was the Sunday of the Veterans’ Day holiday, I listened in no small amazement as the entire congregation stood and sang, without irony or cynicism, “God Bless America.” I have never been so moved by that song as I was in that place and by those voices, and it brought me to tears.

The point of a pilgrimage, of course, is not the destination but the journey, and the change in perspective, the conversion of attitude, the journey makes possible. I went knowing that, as a white man in America, I cannot ever understand the depth and length of the injustice felt by communities of color, especially where violence has sought to block the path toward true equality. But I also went knowing that the conversion of fear into hope has to happen at the level of each human heart, and that the witness of people who have overcome violence with quiet faith is the greatest argument in favor of the power and possibility of faith.

I hope Mother Emanuel will become a place of American pilgrimage, one uniquely able to help us confront our essential American sin. I can tell you that if you go, you will be welcomed. And you will be changed, too.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:32:03-04:00What Price Convenience? Twin Peaks, And The Rewards Of Delayed Gratificationhttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/twin-peaks-instant-gratification-johanna-pittman
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/twin-peaks-instant-gratification-johanna-pittman#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:31:14 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=29026When I was 8-years-old, my family, like so many others, became engrossed in David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks.

At our house, in the time and space between episodes, the all-important question loomed: Who killed Laura Palmer? One evening every week, their anticipation in high gear, my parents turned off the living room lights. Angelo Badalamenti’s moody theme song swelled from the speakers.

And I was told to leave the room.

I was too young to watch, my mom told me. I wouldn’t understand. She guided me into my bedroom, which adjoined the living room, and shut the door.

Lucky for me, that door was well-placed at the back of the living room and swung in the direction of my bedroom. As soon as my parents focused on the show, I would ever so gently open the door, careful to keep it from creaking. Sitting on the floor, my back up against the closet wall, I could (usually) watch undetected.

Disobeying, of course, was a thrill. I spied on an adult world full of damn good coffee, secret ledgers and steamy romance. Agent Cooper’s classic dream sequence, with its weird red room and dancing Man from Another Place, became all the more mysterious and terrifying. Waiting each week to watch what I was not supposed to watch (and occasionally getting caught) made the watching all the better.

Twin Peaks swept the nation a little less than 25 years ago, preceding a quarter century that has seen a rapid rate of technological change. Many of us feel that change most acutely in our daily lives, as consumers. Since 1990, for example, the way Americans watch television has dramatically changed.

Current technologies offer consumers convenience: instant content, instant access, instant gratification. But convenience leaves little room for the rituals that might contextualize and, by extension, enhance a past-time, like gathering around the television at the same hour on the same night of the week, every week.

Sure, Twin Peaks was a great show. But its greatness, like any good film, novel or painting, owes as much to its artistry as to the way it is experienced.

In the winter of 2002, I decided to track down both seasons of Twin Peaks for a thorough, less clandestine, viewing. I found VHS copies of the first season near my dorm in Beacon Hill, at Mike’s Movies. (Beginning the following summer, I would work there for four years, watching the decline of the VHS, the rise of the DVD, and the ushering in of Netflix, with its doomsday toll for the independent store itself.)

The first season was easy enough to find and delicious to watch. Hooked, I was eager to track down the second season, but that proved more difficult. Foiled in video stores from Boston to Cambridge, I got lucky at a Blockbuster in Brookline. On a night of near-blizzard conditions, I navigated the unfamiliar-to-me Green line to Coolidge Corner and trudged for what seemed like miles to the Blockbuster, a destination that, in my mind, might as well have been the Temple of Secrets.

It seems silly now, but I remember that journey as epic, a real odyssey. I was giddy and anxious with anticipation.

I relished the second season, not because it’s good — much of it is not — but for the triumphant pleasure of watching after my struggle to find it.

Late last year, when I heard the news that David Lynch had agreed to revive the series, a quick internet search led me to the complete series on Hulu. Surprise! There they were — Laura, Agent Cooper, the one-armed man — infinitely easy to access. I didn’t even need a television; I watched on my Chromebook.

And what can I say about that experience? When the familiar theme song first piped through the raspy speakers, I was excited, but not for long. After watching only a few episodes, almost out of duty rather than desire, I realized I was only half-engaged.

Maybe I’ve just seen the show too many times to be thrilled by it. Maybe I’ve hardened with age, and what seemed mysterious when I was young no longer does.

Or maybe convenience has its price.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:31:14-04:00Connecting To Our Past, Continuing To Move Forwardhttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/sorting-through-the-leftover-items-of-a-life-morgan-baker
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/sorting-through-the-leftover-items-of-a-life-morgan-baker#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:28:43 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34036In the basement, my husband and his sister oohed and ahhed over childhood memories. They opened a trunk to find a family of stuffed Steiff giraffes — large, medium and small — intact. We wondered about their worth. They found a lapis necklace and silver cuff-links that belonged to Matt’s dad before the divorce. Their box said they were from Bangkok, Siam.

I was in charge of books — most of which were dog-eared paperbacks. Occasionally I discovered a hardback with a sister’s name in it, crossed out and replaced with another sister’s. Those were keepers. We left the leather-bound books for a book buyer and filled four black construction bags with old mysteries and best sellers and took them to a used bookshop nearby.

For the most part, however, I was the cheerleader with invisible pompoms, the moral support, urging my husband and sister-in-law on when the memories got tough. This is the job that’s left to the living after a generation dies.

My mother-in-law died 25 years ago at 61, before our children were born. Their only relationship to her lay in stories and reading her books. But her husband, my husband’s stepfather, continued to live in their home, where many roommates and visitors helped keep the condo alive. Now, at 91, it’s time for him to move out and live with his son in Connecticut.

We will all have a turn at this. My mother died 10 years ago, but my stepfather still lives in their home. Her clothes are gone from the closets but a bag of her half done quilting projects sits in my basement. Her jewelry has been dispersed among her four children, but eventually there will be china and art to sift through.

More importantly, when these organizing gatherings occur, it’s not just the material goods that are sorted, it’s also the past. For those who are sentimental, it’s “Remember this?” and “Oh my God, remember that?” For the practical, it’s “Does this have any value?” or “Who’s going to get this?”

Matt and I don’t need more furniture, but our young adult daughters may as they begin to outfit their homes. Although I keep reading that millennials don’t want their parents’ and grandparents’ things. They want new. They don’t like brown, and most of the available items in our family are walnut or mahogany.

Do we sell? Do we save?

Before descending into the basement, we — my husband, his sister, her husband and I — sat Matt’s stepfather down and asked him. “Are you sure you want to move Bob?”

Yes, he said. But he planned on returning to Cambridge frequently to go to church.

“Why are you moving then?”

The conversation went around and around. I needed coffee.

Matt’s sister suggested a solution. “What if Ellie (our college-aged daughter) and her friends rented the condo for a year, and you kept a room in the basement?”

Bob sat up straighter. His face brightened.

“Why yes, that would be wonderful,” he agreed. “Like a pied-a-terre.” Except his would have poor lighting and concrete flooring.

The task ahead is daunting. The larger basement room, with washer and dryer, is packed tight with furniture, filing cabinets, cardboard boxes and plastic bins, all of which need to be opened and sorted.

The team will then move upstairs to my mother-in-law’s desk which is filled with a lifetime of mail and papers, including my husband’s high school report cards. Two other sisters will fly in to help decide who will get the beds and bureaus, the dining room table and sofa, the side tables and chairs. The house will be stripped bare and grief will rise up from where it has been tamped down for many years.

The reward for all the hard work just might be to see how a small green vase or an empire mahogany chest can connect us to our past as we continue to move forward.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:28:43-04:00Fishing For Progress: Saying No To ‘No Women On Board’http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/equal-rights-amendment-japanese-fishing-vessel-susan-pollack
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/equal-rights-amendment-japanese-fishing-vessel-susan-pollack#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:27:26 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=32745In 1982, as supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment fought claims that that the proposed amendment to the Constitution would destroy the American family, I confronted an older mythology: Women are bad luck on boats.

I was a young maritime reporter for The East Hampton Star on Eastern Long Island. I loved boats and the sea, and I’d always loved adventure. That summer, I planned to join local fishermen aboard a state-of-the-art Japanese squid ship. This was several years after the United States enacted its 200-mile limit, but before American fishermen had fully developed a squid fishery of their own. In exchange for sharing their technical know-how, the Japanese would be permitted to catch squid in our waters.

I was game.

But as I was readying my boots and gear, I received an unexpected warning from the American sponsors of the U.S-Japan venture: no women on board.

Surely, something must be wrong: I’d spent the previous five years in gurry-soaked oil skins reporting on life at sea on American draggers, lobster boats, bay scallopers, gillnetters, long-liners and clamming rigs. I’d photographed the sun rising over the stern of a dragger hauling its catch of yellowtail and blackback flounders, cod, haddock and scup. I’d spent bone-chilling winter days in an open skiff, culling bay scallops -­separating the delicate fan-shaped bivalves from whelks, rocks and seaweed. I’d danced on the boat, not for joy, but to keep warm.

On summer evenings, I’d helped my neighbor lift his gillnets, gingerly plucking out sharp-toothed bluefish and the occasional striper. And I’d finally succeeded in filleting a flounder without mangling the fragile flesh.

It took time to develop the trust of local fishermen­ — and especially that of their wives, who did not know what to make of me or my passion for documenting a life that was so different from my own. Back then, the only women I knew who fished did so accompanied by their husbands or boyfriends. Slowly, however, as fishing families saw that I was serious about representing their concerns, I was welcomed onto the boats.

Now, I had to prove myself all over again.

The author, left, aboard the Kiyo Maru in June, 1982. Right, in the wheelhouse: from left, Kazuumi Ogawa, the Kiyo Maru’s fishing master; Hiromichi Konno, second in command; and Captain Bill Tully, a lobsterman. (Author/Courtesy, East Hampton Star)

The no women on boats announcement blindsided both me and my editor, a woman. She immediately wrote our congressman to seek his intervention, to no avail.

I telephoned the project’s American co-sponsor, who had praised my carefully reported stories. He heard me out, then solemnly declared that Japanese culture was different from our own. He appealed to me to accept that no meant no. He seemed convinced of his Japanese partners’ belief that women are bad luck on boats. The kicker: He told me that if I protested, I would scuttle the whole venture.

His words stopped me in my tracks. Was he saying that if I spoke up for my right to participate, the fishing community I had fought for would be deprived this significant project?

I was ready to back down when I opened a competitor’s newspaper and spotted a piece written from aboard the Japanese ship by its outdoors columnist, a man. I liked the writer, but he was no friend of the commercial fishermen. In the perennial battles between sport and commercial fishermen, he often sided with the sports.

I was livid.

The next morning, I drove down to the docks. The sleek white Japanese ship with its automated jigging machines was anchored offshore. I was prepared to do battle. I asked to speak to the ship’s owner. He emerged from the dock’s office and stood quietly. He spoke little English and I no Japanese. I handed him a folder of my articles and spoke as clearly as I could, “I am a journalist. I want to take photographs and write a story.”

To my surprise, he nodded, paused and returned to the office. It turns out he was calling the translator in New York City. She arranged for me to board the Kiyo Maru the following evening. Had local fisherman put in a word for me? Had the venture’s sponsoring American organizers incorrectly assumed how the Japanese might respond to a woman? I’ll never know.

But the captain and crew were most gracious. During the steam out to the deep-water fishing grounds, we guests — two local lobstermen and I — joined the captain for a meal of miso soup, squid sashimi with soy sauce and wasabi, rice, tea and pickled plums. That night, between the deck lights and the strings of high-powered lamps designed to attract squid, the sea was lit up like an offshore city as the inky cephalopods were pulled from the dark waters. The Kiyo Maru caught more squid that trip than on any other during its east coast collaboration with the U.S. that spring. So much for superstitions.

The following week, after a more than half-century-long fight, the ERA was defeated. The East Hampton Star ran an editorial about my “relatively small” but “timely and telling” victory, while anticipating the long battle still ahead for women and equal rights.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:27:26-04:00In A Trove Of Their Divorced Parents’ Letters, Three Adult Daughters Find Solacehttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/dads-letters-to-mom-barbara-beckwith
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/dads-letters-to-mom-barbara-beckwith#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:26:17 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=33454When my mother died, our father returned for a post-memorial reception in the house where we’d lived while still an intact family. A blazing fire in the wide stone hearth thawed our slightly chilly reunion. Its warmth inspired my younger sister to hand him a cache of love letters we’d found among Mom’s belongings. Dad barely glanced at the precious packet before tossing it into the flames, singeing our hearts, we three daughters of divorce.

What seemed to us like a heartless action may have been understandable, given that Dad’s second marriage, at least according to him, was a happy one. But we could not forgive his indifference: He’d gone away and left us with our mother’s hurt and gradual decline.

So when my sister later discovered a second letter trove, we kept them a secret from him, blithely ignoring copyright law, which makes clear that he was the rightful owner of any and all letters he’d penned.

Like other children of divorced parents, we’d always yearned to know why their conjugal bond had frayed. As Dad tells it, a marriage counselor had advised him that if he loved Mom he must leave her. Otherwise, she would never stop drinking, which would surely kill her.

We never quite believed Dad’s self-serving tale. Underneath our skepticism lay a deeper worry: Was it one of us who’d strained their relationship to the breaking point? Was it my older sister, for interrupting their love as a couple and for causing my mother to give up her social work career? Was it my birth barely a year later that drove her to drink — just evening cocktails at first, but eventually at any time of the day? Was it the third child, conceived seven years later, perhaps to shore up a shaky union, simply too much of a burden?

We looked for clues in the second set of letters that we’d kept for ourselves, each folded into an envelope affixed with 3-cent stamps. Most were written on hotel stationery, since in his job as a fundraiser for Eisenhower, polio research or aid to medical education, he traveled around the country. He wrote home from Chicago, Philadelphia or San Francisco.

In one letter, his script jumps around: he’s writing from a moving train. In another, sweat blurs the ink as he complains, “It’s hot as Hades here.” He writes about loneliness and longing, and in one, he reminds her of “last night,” referring, I suppose, to sex.

Each missive starts “Sweetheart,” “My Darling Marian,” or “My Adorable Wife.” Most of the letters proclaim their “shared philosophy of life and love,” and profess to an enduring commitment. “Ours is a beautiful love,” he declares.“ We must always realize it is something very few people seem to attain let alone return it as we do and shall do.”

My mother responds with equal fervor (our cache includes copies of her letters to him): “How I wish one small portion of this moonlit night could be warmed by the closeness of two people who warm each other as happily as I feel we do. Wonderingly yours, Marian.”

Even in summertime, they had little time together. Mom took us girls to the family cottage in the Poconos, escaping city crowds and polio risks, while Dad raised money to end that dread disease. He would join us only on weekends. A brief mention in one of her letters gives me a frisson of dread. “Stroudsburg holds no hope for beer, wine, or ANY drink, so if you could bring rum or whatever you could get, I’d really like some.”

Another ends: “Linda wants a coloring book with teddies,” followed by “Will you please bring some liquor?”

I want to say: Don’t ask for that Mom, don’t you realize what it will do to all of us?

Despite such inklings of their marriage’s downfall, our parents’ letters make clear that we were not the cause. My mother writes: “I’d like to feel we are giving them every chance we can to grow into happy girls. They are so sweet and trusting, so full of a readiness for life.” My father writes, “I’d like to have you all here – just for an hour a day so that I could drink in each of you and enjoy the sweetness of life as it is to be enjoyed.”

We three children, plus Dad’s travel-heavy job, did leave our parents little time to “enjoy the sweetness of life” together as a twosome. But their letters give us what we’d yearned for: reassurance that they both fully loved us, and once fully loved each other.

So no, Dad, you can’t have your letters. We’re keeping them for ourselves, to read and re-read, to love and to cherish, till death do we part.

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]]>2016-06-09T13:26:17-04:00Looking For Poetry, Finding Herself: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Womanhttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/looking-for-poetry-in-everyday-life-susan-pollack
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/looking-for-poetry-in-everyday-life-susan-pollack#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:24:48 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34266When Annie slipped the lemon yellow beads over my head, I felt beautiful. The necklace sparkled against my black graduation gown. Even though the beads were only glass and on loan, I treasured them.

Annie (not her real name) was different from my other college friends. She had the powerful legs of a dancer and the determination of her mother, Rose, who led rent strikes in Brooklyn. Annie had answers when everyone else had only questions.

We met senior year, in a boarding house off campus, where we rented rooms to write our theses. We often talked till dawn, fueled by espresso and Yeats’s “Crazy Jane” poems. We read our own poems to each other, and we danced — till the Tiparello-smoking rooming house proprietor tired of our midnight grands jetés and threw us out.

Annie moved in with her folksinger boyfriend, Kevin, who was in danger of being drafted. It was 1969, and the Vietnam War was raging. They planned to buy a farm in Canada where actors, artists, musicians and dancers would live. ^^Annie urged me to join them. When I said no, that I would look for a job in publishing, she asked, “Do you want to get stuck opening mail and going for coffee?”

“Great artists are risk-takers. They get out and live, love, celebrate and die. The challenge,” she insisted, “is to find poetry in everyday lives.” Her challenge became my dream.

Rather than calling the New York editor I had interned for the summer prior, I took off for California after graduation. I worked in a Los Angeles soup kitchen, where Sundance, a Lakota Sioux, daydreamed, between alcoholic binges, that Native Americans, poor people and hippies would create a new society. I joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers on the lettuce boycott, and I sought poetry, as Annie would say, in a tough East Oakland hangout, where I took a job tending bar.

When I found myself auditioning for a nude dancing gig at businessman’s pub in downtown San Francisco, I knew it was time to go home. I wanted to believe again in a dream, but I didn’t even know any more what it was. I wrote Annie, who once had confidence enough for both of us. I packed her borrowed yellow beads in my duffel bag and bought a one-way ticket Back East, stopping in New York to see my father, and then heading to Annie and Kevin’s farm on Cape Breton Island.

Annie had cut her long hair. Her John Lennon glasses were gone, too. She seemed to be squinting at me through contact lenses. During breakfast, I planned to return her necklace. But 3-year-old Patrick was crying. The wood we had gathered was too wet to start the fire. And the pig had broken out of the pen.

I stuffed the necklace into my jeans pocket. For the next few days, I watched over Patrick while Annie and Kevin cut and stacked firewood. Patrick was a handful — every bit as fierce as his mother had been. He insisted on walking around with an ax, until Annie finally noticed and took it away from him.

The artists that I had expected to meet weren’t there. I was the only visitor. Annie’s world had shrunk to the demands of raising a son and holding a farm together. She no longer spoke about an expatriate Yaddo.

Most days, she and Kevin worked till dark. I tossed together some greens and brown rice, and, after dinner, we all immediately went to sleep.

One afternoon while freezing vegetables for winter, Annie and I began to talk. As we diced and parboiled sweet peppers and squash, she confided that subsistence farming was much harder than she had imagined. I asked whether she was happy. “Of course,” she snapped. “Pass those zucchini.”

“If you had it to do all over again,” I pressed. But Annie said that she was no longer interested in abstract ideas. She didn’t have time for the philosophic inquiries that occupied her city friends.

I stopped asking questions. We talked about the slugs that were devouring her broccoli crop. She told me about Patrick’s allergies. We tried to fix a leak in the kitchen. After dinner, I went up to my room to read. The warm yellow necklace now lay forgotten at the bottom of my duffel bag.

In mid-October, after Annie and I cut the last cauliflower, I decided to tackle the help-wanteds in New York. I wrote tomy father that I was coming home.

The night before I left, I pulled the necklace out of my bag. As I reached over to hand it to Annie, it slipped from my hand. The threads holding it together parted, scattering the beads under our feet.

Annie said nothing but opened her dog-eared copy of Yeats and read:

Come let me sing into your ear;

Those dancing days are gone

Defiantly, I kicked off my boots and began to dance. When I turned, Annie joined me. The beads sparkled under our feet like yellow stars in the firelight.

Years have passed since that evening on Cape Breton. Annie did not remain a subsistence farmer. Nor did I stay in New York. Long gone is the dream we once shared. But in our own ways, she, nowa teacher, and I, a writer, find poetry in everyday lives.

Read More by Susan Pollack:

]]>2016-06-09T13:29:22-04:00Nothing Is Permanent: And Other Lessons I Learned In My 20shttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/accepting-impermanence-victoria-bonney
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/accepting-impermanence-victoria-bonney#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 17:23:16 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34445On a sweltering afternoon last summer, my marriage ended. I opened our approved divorce decree, got in my car, and drove to hike New Hampshire’s second highest peak with my share of the marital assets — a Cadillac health insurance plan and our cockapoo.

Mount Adams is a craggy, 5,794 foot haul above sea level. Just below tree line sits Grey Knob hut. There, I met Anna and Sarah, who were seasonal caretakers of the huts. They’d spent the past three summers as stewards of the mountain. This was their last summer of freedom. Soon they would put their newly minted college degrees to work and get “real jobs.”

Anna said her parents were horrified when she became a hut caretaker. The huts don’t take reservations so any brawny hiker can arrive in the middle of the night and take shelter. She told her parents Sarah was only a shout away and they relented. After all, it made their daughter happy.

The young women planned to embark on careers in separate states. Anna would stay locally and Sarah would move to New York. I said when they are old and gray that they should return to the huts and rekindle their connection. Without hesitation, Anna replied, “we’d have to ask our husbands first!” Her comment knocked the wind out of me. Neither of them had boyfriends, but, like most of us at that age, Anna had an unconscious vision for how her life would unfold.

Ten years ago, I was the recent college grad with a plan. In the intervening decade, I’ve lived in a million dollar condo, my mother’s basement and on another continent. I’ve worked at the Outback Steakhouse and as press secretary on a U.S. Senate race. I’ve shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue and in thrift stores. I’ve learned outside of our relationship with ourselves, nothing is permanent.

Society rewards the external pieces of our lives. Promotions bring money. Engagements bring diamonds. The work we do to make peace with ourselves and create a life that makes us happy often doesn’t get Facebook likes. No one throws a shower because you left a job or marriage that made you miserable. Even if these are healthiest decisions you’ll ever make, validation will only come from within. That’s the crux of growing up. There is no rule book for adulthood, but our mistakes make great teachers. Here are a few things I’ve learned through the highs and lows of my 20s.

The author, pictured with her dog. (Courtesy)

Be kind on your way up. When I got my first job with the Massachusetts Speaker of the House, I thought I’d made it. I judged my friends who were still living with their parents. At 22, I had a fancy title and my own apartment on Beacon Hill. When I interviewed for the job, my supervisor said I’d never have to write a resume again if I hitched my wagon to the speaker’s star. Less than two years later, the speaker was on trial for accepting bribes and I was living in my mother’s basement sending out resumes. Maybe your career will hold a steady trajectory, your romantic relationships will stay intact, and you’ll never get sick, but showing kindness and humility through your great triumphs is the best insurance plan just in case things don’t go as you’d hoped.

There is no right way. I have a friend who runs the ski lift in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. She works on hourly wage and skis every day. I have another friend who went to Harvard Law School and drives an Audi. Who is more successful? I’ve learned it’s the one who laughs the most and is grateful for what they have today. Success is not one size fits all. In the age of social media, it’s a Herculean task to not compare your choices to someone else’s, but they all involve the same amount of risk.

Prioritize self-care. You may sail invincibility through your 20s — eating pizza, drinking Manhattans, and never stepping on to a treadmill — all while maintaining a size four and never feeling an ounce of ennui. Chances are this will not happen. The habits of your 20s govern your emotional and physical health for years to come. We only get one body and one mind. It’s your job to take care of both.

Bravery trumps talent. If you feel running your own business will fulfill you, don’t doubt your ability to make it work. If you change your mind, guess what? You’re more resourceful and resilient that you can imagine. You can always make a new plan and you’ll no longer have the lingering regret of “what if.”

Find your tribe. Loss has a way of weeding out your sham friends. Remember who was by your side when things were rough and honor that community. Real friends don’t care if you tick the right boxes in the right order. If you want to be homemaker, your tribe will cheer you on. If you get a promotion, they will pop the bubbly with you too.

Don’t accept the premise. Believe it or not, at 31-years-old I’m a millennial. I want it all and I want it now, but life has a way of making our decisions for us. Our ability to catch the curveballs is what makes us the most battle-tested generation ever. We’ve come of age in a great recession, two wars, and a student loan crisis — all while being labeled as spoiled, job-hoppers. You are more than the sum of your experiences or a Twitter bio.

To all the Annas and Sarahs, keep striving. I’ll see you at the summit.

Before I tell it, I apologize to lawyers. The hero at the end of this piece is a lawyer.

The joke goes like this:

A new mandate is going out from the National Institute of Health. From now on, lawyers will be substituted for rats in all laboratory experiments. There are three reasons for this decision.

1. The supply is more plentiful.

2. The lab assistants will get less attached.

3. There are some things a rat won’t do.

There are some things a rat won’t do. Character is defined by choices, and particularly by choices under very difficult circumstances.

If ever there were a moment when the nation, and particularly the GOP, could use some major demonstrations of character, it’s now. And instead, it seems like its party leaders are getting bested by the rats.

Sen. McCain was shot down, injured and imprisoned by the North Vietnamese. He was tortured, and he suffered. And then he came home and successfully managed a long career in public service. Now he’s almost 80 years old.

Wouldn’t this have been the moment for him to risk re-election in order to stand up to Trump, a man who publicly humiliated McCain and questioned his service? A man who declared, “I like people who weren’t captured.” The comment demeaned not only McCain, but also all who ever risked — or gave — their lives for our country. Wouldn’t this have been the perfect occasion for McCain to say, “On behalf of all who have served, fought and sacrificed for the United States, I will not now or ever endorse Donald Trump!”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., pictured on June 3, 2016. (Wong Maye-E/AP)

Just when we needed him to be brave, John McCain lost his nerve. He could have helped the country remember its better self. Instead, he debased himself and surrendered his dignity, and for what? What could the senator still want out of politics that is more valuable than his honor and the honor of the Armed Services?

And then there’s Paul Ryan. The House speaker “disavowed” Trump’s racist remarks about Hispanic and Muslim judges, but declared that he backed the candidate anyway. You cannot back a racist candidate without supporting his racism. That’s not just disingenuous, it’s impossible.

Think for a moment about political courage as we’ve seen it at important moments in our country. Think about William Lloyd Garrison, Martin Luther King, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger.

Think about Joseph Welch’s great courage on June 4, 1954, publicly calling out Joe McCarthy, during the senator’s terrible reign, when he was destroying one innocent person after another and deeply harming the United States as he conducted an anti-communist witch hunt.

McCarthy had attacked a young Republican lawyer who worked for Welch, and Welch had had enough. He lambasted the senator during a televised hearing, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Welch’s courage in facing down McCarthy marked the beginning of the end for the rabid senator.

Where are the Republicans of courage today? Is winning at any cost their single value? At a national moment when the clear patriotic position is to oppose Trump on every front, the party of Lincoln is circling the wagons and perfecting its doublespeak. Maybe it’s time the NIH started substituting them for the rats.

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]]>2016-06-09T11:43:41-04:00Behind Bars, Behind The Times? Reconsidering The Zoohttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/behind-bars-behind-the-times-reconsidering-the-zoo
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/09/behind-bars-behind-the-times-reconsidering-the-zoo#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 08:59:06 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34651Not long before I graduated from college, my grandfather, a retired pharmaceuticals scientist and executive, allowed me to sit in on a board meeting at the Indianapolis Zoo, where men and women in crisp-looking shirts and suits discussed an upcoming apes exhibit.

Zoos in which animals are confined behind Plexiglass walls are outdated, the board members said. My grandfather looked at me and nodded as the zoo’s director described how the apes in the exhibit would access to cables suspended high over the heads of zoo-goers, so they could experience “urban vines,” moving as they would in a natural jungle canopy, while giving spectators a wowing, 360-degree show.

Michael Schrimper: “…zoos of all kinds are outdated, if not barbaric. Animals are not specimens to be gawked at, kept like stuffed dolls on display.” (Elmira G/Unsplash)

When I learned of the glorious silverback gorilla shot and killed in the Cincinnati Zoo late last month, I realized that I never made it to see the Indianapolis Zoo’s ever-popular apes. I have no desire to go see the primates, no matter how many “urban vines” decorate their exhibit. Even that word — exhibit — reminds me that zoos of all kinds are outdated, if not barbaric. Animals are not specimens to be gawked at, kept like stuffed dolls on display.

Proponents of zoos and animal-oriented entertainment companies like Sea World argue that these facilities foster interest in animals and the natural world,particularly among young people. Having up-close and personal access to, say, giraffes, inspires reverence for the creatures, the thinking goes. But think about dinosaurs. No child hasever seen a dinosaur in the flesh, yet children the world over are enchanted by the creatures: their club-like tails, the spikes starring their spine.

It’s not proximity that inspires reverence or interest, but distance. Knowing that animals exist not in our immediate realm but, rather, deep in their own habitat allows them mystique. Most important, the distance that creates this mystique allows animals the lives they are meant to have.

Specialists working at zoos cite how the dangers of the wild are often so great that animals are safer in captivity. Sea World pushed back hard against claims about its treatment of killer whales in the documentary “Blackfish.” A spokesperson refuted primatologist Jane Goodall’s assertion that Sea World’s orcas live in an “acoustical hell,” claiming that the tanks in which the company’s orcas are kept are quieter than the “ambient ocean.”

But it’s naïve to think that the dangers and unpleasantness of the wild are less detrimental to animals than the pseudo-lives we force uponthem in zoos and similar facilities. Biologically, a gorilla has evolved to crack open a green coconut and to protect her young from a leopard. A gorilla has not evolved to understand that a 3-year old human in his enclosure is to be protected, or that the child’s accidental presence there presents a mortal threat to his own.

My grandfather served on the board of the Indianapolis Zoo for a decade. For decades more, he helped develop the zoo into one of the city’s central destinations. My day behind the scenes with him there was magical for me, one of many marvelous experiences he bestowed upon me. I stood watching as a young elephant “painted” my portrait with the yellow, teal and purple paint I had selected for the extra-long brushes the majestic beast had been trained to grasp with her trunk. I inhaled deeply insidea small, refrigerated room green with eucalyptus that wouldbe hand-fed to the koalas like leafy Popsicles. Yet I have not been to a zoo since.

Michael Schrimper: “Who has not had the experience of seeing a yellowing polar bear listless on his rock?” (Ross Sokolovski/Unsplash)

Who has not hadthe experience ofseeing a yellowing polar bear listless on his rock? Who has not noticed the unnaturally slow drift of an orcathrough her green water as spied from the other side of a wall of child-smudged glass?

Zoos are soul-destroying places, no matter how much the likeness of a natural habitat is achieved for each animal. In the wake of the news from Cincinnati, one’s mind pivots to the only place wild animals should be: the wild.

]]>2016-06-08T17:29:43-04:00Is It Better To Bern Out Than Fade Away? A Look At What’s Next For Sanders Supportershttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/08/bernie-sanders-now-what-steve-almond
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/08/bernie-sanders-now-what-steve-almond#respondWed, 08 Jun 2016 09:00:52 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34612For months now, I have been touting Bernie Sanders as the most inspiring and morally courageous presidential candidate to run in my lifetime.

I have sung his praises far and wide, given money to his campaign, and even tried to convince my wife to vote for him. And I have argued that Sanders shouldn’t quit the race simply because he’s behind in the delegate count.

But I also agree with Sanders that the legacy of his historic campaign — its ideas and principles — mustn’t be limited to the fate of his candidacy. His message has to be deeper, and more enduring, than that.

Sanders has stressed, over and over again, that it will take a political revolution to dismantle the corruption of our political system. Millions of Americans will have to rise up to demand a more compassionate and responsive government, one whose agenda is set by the people, not purchased by billionaire donors.

I still believe that.

But I also accept that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president. On Tuesday night, she secured the magic number of pledged delegates. She won, fair and square. More significantly, overall, she received millions more votes than Sanders. (This is a stark contrast from the 2008 primary, in which Clinton lost to Barack Obama despite having won the majority of votes.)

I know that many of my fellow Sanders supporters are frustrated and angry. I know that they view Clinton as a flawed candidate, and perhaps even a stooge for the status quo.

I also know that beneath all this contempt is an honest and understandable sense of disappointment. They believe — and I happen to agree with them — that Bernie would have thumped Trump in the general election, and unmasked him as the hollow demagogue he is.

But Sanders — barring illness or indictment — will not be the nominee. So the question for all of us now is: How do we remain true to his progressive agenda? How do we keep the focus on the ideas that drew us to Bernie: ridding politics of private money, making corporations and plutocrats pay their fair share, ensuring that education and medical care and a livable wage are rights, not privileges?

Every Sanders supporter has to decide that for him or herself. The point of this piece isn’t to urge folks to calm down and fall in line behind Hillary. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, that’s a condescending attitude.

My point is that we now have to consider our moral and political goals in light of this new reality.

Eight years after conceding she was unable to “shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Hillary Clinton is embracing her place in history as she finally crashes through as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Here, she takes the stage at a rally on Monday. (John Locher/AP)

For some Bernie supporters, this will mean encouraging him to run as an independent. Others will urge him to contest the Democratic convention. And still others may decide that they want to take their chances with the other “anti-establishment” candidate.

My own hope is that Sanders will broker a deal with Hillary, in which he pledges to throw his support behind her if (and only if) she promises to run a campaign that honors some of the core policy ideas that have so galvanized his supporters.

Sanders was never given a fair shake by our for-profit corporate media. They were too in the thrall of Donald Trump’s seductive dysfunction. But the astonishing outpouring of support for this aging socialist from Vermont translates into real political power. He should use that power to negotiate on behalf of us, his constituents.

Will he get everything he asks for? No. That’s not how politics works. But he needs to get everything he can.

And we, his loyal partisans, need to focus on making sure that we don’t let the larger goals of the movement wither with his candidacy. We need to support other progressive candidates and causes — at the local, state and federal level.

Sanders is right. The American system of democracy has been ravaged for too long by the twin plagues of greed and cynicism. Our challenge now is to stay focused on the goals Sanders has bravely articulated over the course of his career.

It is my devout hope that these goals will be central to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The more central they are, the more fervent my support for her will be.

And the more likely she will be to win the support of others — progressives, independents and conservatives alike — who are sickened by the politics of rage and hopelessness.

]]>2016-06-08T10:32:51-04:00Why We Should Care That Saudi Arabia And Iran Are At Each Other’s Throatshttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/08/resolving-the-saudi-iran-divide-susan-e-reed
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/08/resolving-the-saudi-iran-divide-susan-e-reed#respondWed, 08 Jun 2016 08:59:18 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34474Americans viewing the escalating tit for tat between Saudi Arabia and Iran may feel some relief that the countries have now turned their sights on each other instead of the U.S. But their poor relations are bad for peace. It is paramount for the U.S. to help the world’s largest theocracies to restore diplomatic ties; we need them to create a stable, functioning Middle East.

In the most recent drama, Iran has forbidden its citizens to attend the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia in September. While preventing such a journey is surely a disappointment for the tens of thousands of Iranians who wait years to fulfill one of the pillars of Islam, it also marks a deeper rift in Saudi-Iran relations in a year that has been marred by division and retribution.

Iran’s boycott grew out of a stampede on a crowded street in Mecca that killed thousands last fall. The two countries have not even been able to agree on the numbers of those who perished, with Saudi Arabia asserting that around 700 were killed and Iran claiming that more than 4,500 people died. (The AP puts the death toll at 2,411.) For months, officials had been discussing ways to guarantee safety at the venue, but could not come to terms. Implicit in Iran’s boycott is the suggestion that the House of Saud is a poor protector of at least one of the two holy cities.

But it is also payback for the Saudis severing diplomatic ties, trade and air traffic with Iran earlier this year. Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni Wahhabist Muslims, and Iran by Shia Muslims. While the sects have competed for centuries, tension between the two nations escalated in January after Saudi Arabia executed a popular minority Shia cleric, Nimr al-Nimr, and 46 others. In protest, a Tehran mob stormed the Saudi embassy. The Saudis cut off practically all ties with Iran.

Just as Iran was getting out from UN sanctions after agreeing to the nuclear deal with the U.S., the Saudis harshly retaliated, trying to put Iran — an oil producer like Saudi — back into a box. The U.S. negotiation of the deal left the kingdom feeling particularly vulnerable and concerned about Iran’s resurgence. Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi allies, followed with their own punishments.

The Saudis see Iran as a serious threat in the region, with three times the population and more than twice the number of active army troops. But Saudi is much richer, and spends five times the amount on defense as Iran does.

The United States had rightly urged the Saudis not to execute al-Nimr and has appealed to both countries to respect their Sunni and Shia minorities. The Obama administration should continue to promote human rights and religious tolerance, in addition to trying to get Saudi Arabia and Iran to re-establish ties.

Their rivalry is roiling the Middle East through multiple proxy fights. The Saudis are battling the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, while supporting fighters in Syria who are trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad who is reinforced by Iran.

As the Islamic State is defeated in Iraq, the U.S. will need cooperation from both the Saudis and the Iranians to create more stability. The Saudis could help persuade the Sunni tribes in Iraq that have helped and supported Islamic State to put down their arms. The Iranians could stop supporting and controlling the Shia militias that have helped push out the Islamic State.

President Obama predicted that the Islamic State would be routed from Mosul by the end of the year. That gives his administration just months to get the Saudis and the Iranians to agree to use their influence to bring peace to Iraq, which eventually could become a place where both Sunnis and Shia feel safe.

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]]>2016-06-07T17:27:41-04:00Brock Turner, And What We Talk About When We Talk To Our Kids About Rapehttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/07/stanford-swimmer-rape-ben-jackson
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/07/stanford-swimmer-rape-ben-jackson#respondTue, 07 Jun 2016 09:00:26 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34595My daughter’s eighth grade health class is devoted to sex education this term. Last week, I asked her if she had ever heard the word “consent” in her class.

She had not, but thought they “were going to talk about it tomorrow.” Very near the end of the term.

I’m a 40-year-old man. Beyond a “no-means-no” admonition from my mother in my teens (in the middle of a culture where people frequently quipped “no means no unless it means yes”), I was never given a lesson on consent. Not in sex ed classes in middle or high school. Not in college. Not at home.

Nor were any of my male friends.

Women, however, were a different story. They were removed from class if their shorts or skirts were more than a finger’s length above the knee. They were told not to drink. They were told not to walk alone at night. They were told not to dress “like they were asking for it.”

They were told to change their behavior to avoid being raped. We were never told to change ours to avoid raping.

Last week, a former elite athlete at an elite college was sentenced on his convictions of three felony sexual assault counts in California. If you’ve read the victim’s statement, and I would very much encourage you to do so, you know just how egregious this crime was. The victim, a recent college graduate, who was too drunk to stand up, was attacked behind a dumpster. During the attack, two passers-by saw what was happening, chased and caught the attacker, and then called for help.

Brock Turner, the man who was caught perpetrating the assault, claimed that his victim “liked” the assault. He claimed he was drunk and that both parties made bad decisions because of the alcohol. He claimed that his recent volunteer work with high school children speaking on the evils of drinking could perhaps, in some way, atone for their mistakes.

That’s right — Turner, even after being thrice convicted (of assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated woman, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object), seemed to believe that alcohol was the culprit.

As the victim said to Turner in court, “You said, ‘I stupidly thought it was okay for me to do what everyone around me was doing, which was drinking. I was wrong.’ Again, you were not wrong for drinking. Everyone around you was not sexually assaulting me.”

This is the culture of entitlement in which we live — women who cannot consent are presumed to default to “yes,” by far, far too many men who were never taught differently. Given that at least 20 percent of women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime in America, this is something which desperately needs to be taught.

And clearly, Turner was never taught this. His father, in writing a character letter for his son, stated to the court, “His life will never be the one he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life. The fact that he now has to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life forever alters where he can live, visit, work and how he will be able to interact with people and organizations. What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions on the night of Jan 17th 2015” (emphasis mine). On the night he committed rape.

Turner learned this at home. Like so many other men. In being convicted of sexual assault, he and his father are somehow convinced that he is the victim.

And then the judge, also a former elite athlete at the same elite school Turner attended sentenced him to six months in county jail and probation.

For a crime with a minimum sentence of one year in prison. In trying to justify his shamefully weak sentence, the elected judge cited the convict’s loss of a scholarship and intoxication on the night of the rape as mitigating factors, and stated “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him … I think he will not be a danger to others.”

Unless he gets drunk, but apparently that can mitigate rape.

And so, we learn from the justice system, and this is why so many sexual assaults go unreported to the police.

That night, I continued my conversation with my daughter about consent. I told her that she is the only person who can give permission to anyone to touch her in any way. I told her that she can revoke that consent at any time. I told her it doesn’t matter what state she’s in, nobody has a right to her which she does not agree. And then I taught her how to fight back against anyone who tried to violate that consent.

We need to teach our daughters and our sons that consent is sacrosanct. That there are consequences to violating it. And that our daughters are powerful enough to immediately enforce those consequences.

Related:

]]>2016-06-08T10:11:57-04:00Reporter’s Notebook: Covering Muhammad Ali When He Was Kinghttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/07/muhammad-ali-in-1974-r-b-scott
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/07/muhammad-ali-in-1974-r-b-scott#respondTue, 07 Jun 2016 08:59:55 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34600The photograph shows a handsome black man — he often mockingly described himself as “pretty” (and he was) — behind the wheel of an interstate bus that had been converted into a mobile hotel. It was the summer of 1974, and I had been with Muhammad Ali for the better part of a week, tagging along with him nearly everywhere. He was driving the bus to the repair shop several miles away when the picture was snapped.

For days he had pressed fractured poetry (“You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned?/Wait `til I whup George Foreman’s behind./Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee./His hand can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.”) on me, the skeptical young staff writer from People Magazine seated directly behind him.

He had also ladled windy incantations (“I am the greatest”) with inconsistent religious beliefs, too (“whites are devils”), and a corollary: a gigantic spaceship filled with the “colored” people of the world would return to destroy white people.

Co Rentmeester, the photographer, pressed into the windshield to get a better angle on the driver of the bus that was hurtling down the interstate. Co was shooting away when I gathered up the nerve and asked, “So how can a man who preaches world brotherhood rationalize support for such patently racist teachings?”

As Ali turned to glare at me like only a heavyweight boxing champion could, he pulled the steering wheel. Regaining control of the careening bus, eyes riveted on the road, he reminded me that if we had all been killed then the newspaper headline would read “Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, Killed With Two Others In Horrific Bus Rollover.”

And, then he winked.

The mouthy 19-year-old, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. from Louisville, Kentucky, mounted the world stage in 1960 when he won the gold medal in boxing at the Olympic Games in Rome. Four years later, at age 22, he won the world heavyweight championship in an upset victory over Sonny Liston. He exited the stage last week when he finally succumbed, at age 74, to the blows his head and body had absorbed from the fists of sluggers like Liston, Ken Norton, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Leon Spinks and even the genial “Bayonne Bleeder,” Chuck Wepner.

As a young man, Clay reveled in “The Louisville Lip” nickname bestowed on him by the then less than worshipful news media. Many journalists turned even more disparaging when he converted to Islam, forsook his Christian name for Muhammad Ali, refused to subject himself to the draft and, as a result, was convicted of draft evasion in 1968, which led to a ban from boxing and forfeiture of the heavyweight boxing title.

By 1974 when I caught up with him for a week of in person interviews and observation, the conviction had been overturned and he was on the road to reclaiming what was rightfully his, even though his chances were negligible against reigning world champion Foreman in an October championship bout in Kinshasa, Zaire dubbed “The Rumble in The Jungle.”

Over the summer of that year, Ali withdrew to the log cabin training enclave in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Hours before sunrise, his body would be lathered in Vaseline, presumably to make him perspire more on daily jog. Wearing army surplus combat boots and gray sweats, he lumbered through the pre-dawn mist down narrow and winding country roads, the van carrying his trainers illuminating the pavement ahead and protecting from behind. Hours later, he would rhythmically beat the speed bag like an accomplished drummer, sweat beading on his brow and bare chest, preening for tourists’ and flirting with pretty girls.

Even then his loyal personal physician, Ferdie Pacheco, was concerned the fight game was sucking the juice out of the body he considered to be the most perfect he’d ever seen. Pacheco argued that win or lose, the fight in Kinshasa should be Ali’s last, even though Ali himself was already talking about a series of easy subsequent fights “for the money.”

In Zaire, he out-maneuvered the stronger and younger Foreman. The stunning eighth round knockout captured the imaginations of even former skeptics like me. As he had forecast months earlier, his name and the Lingala chant Ali Bomaye (“Ali Kill Him”) was recognized by people from Zaire to The Philippines, the site of his next fight — “The Thrilla In Manilla” — against Joe Frazier.

In this Oct. 30, 1974 photo, Muhammad Ali watches as defending world champion George Foreman goes down to the canvas in the eighth round of their WBA/WBC championship match in Kinshasa, Zaire. (AP)

Later in 1974, Rentmeester and I caught up with Ali again at a mosque in Chicago’s notoriously perilous South Side (only a bribe persuaded the cabbie to take us all the way there). When we arrived, Ali’s children were sleeping soundly in the back seat of an idling Rolls Royce, unattended at the curb.

Then it was off to his mother-in-law’s suburban home where a television embedded high on the mirrored living room wall was broadcasting “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” A young man from Zaire, who had returned home with the champ, cried as the pursuers of the fleeing slaves in the movie torched the barn where runaways had sought shelter. “Why?” the young man wailed.

Ali, buried beneath the two young daughters on his lap, seemed about to comment when someone angrily muttered, “White men. That’s what they do.”

Loosening his arm lock on one daughter, Ali corrected: “Some white men, not ones like him.” He gestured toward me.

And, then he winked.

Related:

]]>2016-06-07T14:53:10-04:00In Defense Of The Political Establishmenthttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/06/in-defense-of-the-political-establishment-rich-barlow
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/06/in-defense-of-the-political-establishment-rich-barlow#respondMon, 06 Jun 2016 09:00:56 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34573During Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, his opponents mocked his party’s politicians, with one newspaper decrying, “Office-holders, Office-seekers, Pimps.” I wonder if the editor was an ancestor of Donald Trump, who has excited hordes this year with similar attacks on his own party’s establishment, not to mention Democrats’. Politicians are “full of s—,” he said in New Hampshire while discussing veterans’ inadequate health care. “That’s why you do need Trump, because you know what? No politician’s gonna solve this.”

If Trump’s answer to our woes is himself — a winner who will take America back from the losers now in charge — Bernie Sanders has inspired similarly worshipful hordes by tirelessly trumpeting a “political revolution” — albeit peaceful — against our establishment politics. The revolution he seeks, Sanders says, means, “bringing millions and millions of people into the political process in a way that does not exist right now” to muscle a do-nothing Congress into legislating progressive wet dreams.

Put aside the Vermonter’s failure to recruit even a majority of Democratic voters to his revolution. A new book by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz shows that Sanders and Trump are tapping a longstanding American tension between issue activists, who always want more from their leaders, and politicians, who must compromise in order to achieve anything.

Both camps are necessary for good governance, Wilentz writes in “The Politicians and the Egalitarians.” But that means that, in dissing the two parties and their politicians, Trump and Sanders are, quite simply, fools. They and their minions misunderstand how progress happens in their own country.

The book cites that long-ago anti-Jefferson quote as part of our tradition of damning pols, but Wilentz counters that tradition succinctly: “The antiparty current is by definition antidemocratic, as political parties have been the only reliable electoral vehicles for advancing the ideas and interests of ordinary voters.”

Trump’s histrionics, coming from a narcissist whose unfamiliarity with public issues is legendary, may fool only his diehards. Dispensing with Sanders’s well-intentioned but equally misguided rant about revolution requires a little history, starting with how “party democracy,” as Wilentz calls it, ended the nation’s greatest sin, slavery.

The infant Republican Party, led by the cunningly partisan Abraham Lincoln, waged civil war to crush the slavocracy. That’s pretty revolutionary, but it didn’t seem so to radical abolitionists, the Sanderistas of their day: Lincoln, with an eye toward maintaining public support for his policies, at times stressed reuniting the country over freeing the slaves. His greatest act, the Emancipation Proclamation, declared all slaves free — unless they happened to live in Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware and other slave-holding areas that remained in the Union and whose support Lincoln needed to win the war.

Honest Abe, in short, played politics and relied on party machinery (Republicans dominated Congress after southern Democrats seceded), Wilentz reminds us. “Ever since,” he writes, “all of the great American social legislation, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal to the Great Society, has been achieved by and through the political parties.” The New Deal is especially apt, as someSanders supporters extoll it as the type of political revolution their man seeks. Wrong. Working with his Democratic Party — which included southern segregationists — FDR achieved much while settling for plenty of half loaves.

The landmark Wagner Act gave most workers the rights of unionizing and collective bargaining. But under pressure from conservative Democrats in the South and West, Wilentz writes, it exempted agricultural employees. Social Security, meanwhile, omitted agricultural and federal workers, domestic servants and casual laborers from its coverage for efficiency reasons — which meant, among other things, it left many African-Americans high and dry. Wilentz also could have noted that the Roosevelt administration abandoned plans to include national health insurance with Social Security’s pensions, fearing diehard opposition to the former would doom both if they were linked.

The hard left savaged FDR, condemning the Wagner Act for aping Mussolini’s corporate-state policies. The U.S. Communist Party stated the comparison more bluntly, labeling the New Dealers “social fascists,” Wilentz notes. History has ruled otherwise.

This pattern of evolutionary progress on the back of party politics has played out in our own time. Using Democratic support in his first term to beat reflexive Republican opposition, Barack Obama passed a health care law that, while imperfect, made the down payment on universal health insurance that eluded the great FDR. He passed Wall Street reforms, again imperfect, that nevertheless have had positive effects. His stimulus plan was too small, but by economists’ near-universal consensus, it helped avert the type of depression that confronted Roosevelt. Only a Bernie Bro (or a Trump supporter) would deny that these are signal achievements.

Wilentz isn’t blind to “the countless and unending episodes of partisan politicians corrupting our politics and sustaining social wrongs.” From denying climate change to the occasional racist spasm, Tea Partiers made the GOP a doofus den long before Trump did. On a lesser scale, Hillary Clinton’s indefensible though hardly nation-threatening email shenanigans, and the stream of Republicans endorsing Trump with fingers plainly clenching their noses, will further feed voter cynicism.

Yet history is clear: If you want a fix for dishonest or corrupt party hacks, vote them out in favor of honest politicians. (Yes, there are a few of those. Obama has conducted himself admirably as president.) Indeed, one critic of Wilentz faults him not because his thesis is wrong, but because it’s old news in political science. Sanders ultimately may grasp this. The lifelong independent ran for the Democratic nomination, after all, and has said he hopes to use his strong showing to make the party a vehicle for more progressive policies.

Let’s hope he’s good for his word. Obama recently rebutted liberal griping that he hasn’t enacted the kingdom of God on earth, illustrating how compromise is not only inevitable in office, but the only path to any progress. The president, who attained office on hopes of a post-partisan presidency, knows better than anyone how illusory that hope was.

Read More By Rich Barlow On Trump And Sanders:

]]>2016-06-08T17:19:16-04:00Heavy Meddle: Help! I Binge Eat At Night!http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/06/heavy-meddle-162-steve-almond
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/06/heavy-meddle-162-steve-almond#respondMon, 06 Jun 2016 08:59:09 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=33982Welcome Meddleheads, to the column where your crazy meets my crazy! Please send your questions.You can use this form, or send them via email. Not only will you immediately feel much better, you’ll also get some advice.

Hugs,Steve

…

Dear Steve,

I have a problem. I am a compulsive nighttime overeater. On a typical day, I eat appropriate portions of healthy food for breakfast and lunch. And then, once the sun goes down, something happens. I become ravenous. Well, no, that’s not actually true. It’s not even that I’m hungry; it’s just that my self-control evaporates and something takes over me. It’s like I don’t have a choice. I go to the kitchen and surrender. I’ve eaten an entire large pizza in one sitting. On another occasion, I ate an entire pound of pasta. Countless times, I’ve polished off an entire box of cereal inside fifteen minutes. I could go on. I won’t.

I’ve struggled with overeating, as well as bulimia (though at the present time that at least is in check), in secret for many years. I think part of the problem is that I live alone, so I don’t have to work very hard to hide it. I’ve been in therapy on and off for many years for a host of issues, but my relationship to food has been a central theme. One counselor suggested mindful eating – sitting down with my pre-portioned dinner, eating slowly and deliberately, and thinking about every bite I take. If I am compelled to overeat, she advised, stop and think about why I am motivated to do so. Try to come up with alternative ideas. Remember, in that moment, how lousy it feels after.

It’s been an effective strategy when I muster the strength. But more often than not, when I’m eating, I just quiet my mind, and allow myself to shovel forkful upon forkful. For those few moments, I am blissfully checked out, in the throes (I suppose) of my addiction. I’ve considered Overeaters Anonymous, but shame has kept me in the closet. Even the act of writing an anonymous letter, acknowledging that I do this, is deeply humiliating. What should I do?

Thank you in advance for your help,
Can’t Stop

…

Dear Can’t Stop,

Believe it or not, there is an official diagnostic label for folks who suffer from this pattern of compulsive eating at night. But I suspect you already know this.

There are plenty of behavioral measures, large and small, that you can take to try to combat what is called “Night Time Binge Eating Disorder.” They include:

*Eating a good breakfast

*Establishing a set pattern of having three meals daily, if possible a day at regular times

*Preparing healthy night-time snacks

*Purging your home of binge foods

*Brushing your teeth after dinner

*Tracking your eating habits

These all sound good and logical, and probably help with lots of folks. But I suspect that your pattern of over-eating is emotional and psychological, not physical. Actually, I don’t suspect. I know. Because you say so:

It’s not even that I’m hungry, it’s just that my self-control evaporates and something takes over me.

That something is a compulsion. It may be worsened by programming your gut brain to expect a sucrose bomb every night. But it arises from some darker set of anxieties that lurk beneath your insatiable hunger. I have no clue what those might be, though I suspect they were the root cause of your bulimia, as well. The net effect, in this case, is that you manage to transform food from a source of pleasure and nourishment into an instrument of self-punishment and guilt.

The one thing I can say with some assurance is that disorders of this sort — ones predicated on shame — thrive when they are concealed. The only way you can begin to heal is to confront the fact that you have a disorder. Give the Devil (and the devil’s food cake) its due. Stop beating yourself up. Because that kind of self-hatred is what undermines your efforts to get better.

The logic works like this: Why should anyone help me get better when I’m such a gluttonous weakling?

Again, you have a disorder.

And, as it happens, millions upon millions of other people do, too. So not only do I recommend that you find a therapist who specializes in food disorders. I hereby order you to attend a meeting of Overeaters Anonymous. (Okay, “order” is above my pay grade. How about I just implore you?)

This is vital. Because the moment you come out to people at that meeting, you will be accepted for who you are, and what you’re struggling with. You will feel part of a community. The shame and guilt you’ve been lugging around will start to give way to reckoning. With all due respect to Van Morrison, the healing will begin.

About the best thing you could have done was to write me a letter. Now you’re job is to take the next step. Find a therapist you can trust. Find a group in which you can feel less alone. Start imagining a life in which you can quiet your mind without stuffing your face.

It’s out there. But you have to overcome your shame and step toward it.

Onward, together,
Steve

♥

Author’s note: I certainly know my way around a late-night cupcake, but I don’t have personal experience with eating disorders. So I’d love to hear from some readers who recognize some of the struggles Can’t Stop is describing. What else does he or she need to hear? Your advice is most welcome in the comments section below. And feel free to send a letter to Heavy Meddle, too. You can use this form, or send your questions via email. I may not have a helpful response, but the act of writing the letter itself might provide some clarity. — S.A.

]]>2016-06-08T10:11:50-04:00Russell Banks On Travel, Writing Everything Down, And That Time With Fidel Castrohttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/03/5questions-for-russell-banks-kelly-horan
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/03/5questions-for-russell-banks-kelly-horan#respondFri, 03 Jun 2016 18:43:02 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34236To read Russell Banks is to spend time with a writer who carries in his bones a New England of faded mill towns and fragmented lives. Twice shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Banks was born in Newton, Massachusetts, raised in small town New Hampshire, and wrote his first short stories in Boston in the early 1960s.

But it is the far-flung reaches of the globe — as well as the deep, hidden interiors of the author’s own emotional landscape — to which we are transported in the 10 essays in “Voyager,” Banks’s new collection of travel writings. Themes familiar from Banks’s fiction are here — there is wanderlust and moral ambiguity, the stain of slavery and the grapplings of a good man recalling some bad choices. And there is the writing we’ve come to recognize: arresting, beguiling, direct. Who wouldn’t want to read a book that begins, “A man who has been married four times has a lot of explaining to do.”

I spoke with Russell Banks recently by phone. Our conversation, slightly edited and condensed for clarity below, ranged from the author’s recollections of being hosted by Fidel Castro, to the guilty reading pleasures on his bedside table. — Kelly Horan

You write in “Voyager” that a memoir is like a travel book — structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in. What you put in to the 10 essays in this collection covers not only the essence and history of place, but a good deal of your own private geography, as well. Is there something about travel that makes you especially introspective?

Russell Banks: “There is something about casting myself loose that opens me up to where I am, but also to where I am in my own life, as well.” (Gregorio Franchetti/Courtesy)

I think that’s true, at least for me. Once I’m on the move and out of my familiar environment — meaning the one I can live in without thinking much about it, where my moves are more or less automatic — once I’m in a world where I essentially have to invent my moves on a moment to moment basis, I become more reflective and conscious of my past and the need to address it and put it into some kind of coherent narrative for myself.

I keep a little notebook, like most writers do, in my pocket. When I am traveling, I write everything down. The notebook fills very quickly with the names of trees, the weather, an idle conversation with someone in the seat next to me on the bus. It also fills with memories and speculations and remorse and so forth going back in my own life. There is something about casting myself loose that opens me up to where I am, but also to where I am in my own life, as well.

You once told an interviewer, “The narrative that early on attracted me was the run from civilization, in which a young fellow in tweeds at Colgate University lights out and becomes a robin hood figure in fatigues in the Caribbean jungle.” You did that — fled Colgate in dark of night after only eight weeks as a student there. You didn’t quite make it to the revolution, but 42 years later, you were Fidel Castro’s guest in Havana. What place does Cuba have in your heart?

I live half the year in Miami, so [Cuba] is easy access for me. I went down in December for a week just to hang out, with no official reason for being there. I just wanted to catch the flavor of it and compare it to the last time I was there, in 2003, with Bill Kennedy.

The difference was amazing to me. It’s not that surprising when you think about it. In 2003, there was pessimism and bleakness on the street – bitterness, even. This time, there was enthusiasm, openness, energy and optimism. It went from pessimism to optimism in just a few years, and that has everything to do with the American opening and end of the embargo.

Streets that in 2003 were all boarded up – I’m talking about every doorway – were open now. In every doorway, people were selling t-shirts, food, drink, sandals. Every door that, 12 years previously, was boarded up and empty. It’s a fantastic shift.

A fantastic shift, but do you fear for Cuba? A theme in your title essay, “Voyager,” is the tragedy of seeing these Caribbean islands that you love so much loved to death by tourism. Do you worry that the terrible dilemma facing the people who live there – having to exploit their home to feed their families — will be Cuba’s dilemma now, too?

I have deep anxiety over it. Just before I left Miami to come back north [this spring], the first cruise ship from the U.S. touched down in Havana and circumnavigated the island with 1,500 American tourists on board. I thought, Oh boy here they come. What is going to happen to this island? Instead of 300,000 academics, ornithologists, journalists and others there for professional reasons, they are replaced by 5 million American tourists coming in for a holiday where they want, essentially, to buy the place on some level. American real estate and banking and manufacturing interests are busily lining up to serve those interests. Not to mention the tourist industry.

I did ask Fidel about that in 2003. What happens when the embargo goes down? He said at the time that he thought the revolution had settled into the Cuban people and culture like DNA, and they could resist all the temptations and the blandishments. But it was clear on [my most recent] visit that they are embracing capitalism with a fervor that is scary. I would hate to see in Cuba what happened in the Soviet Union after the end of the USSR. A better model might be Vietnam, where you have a Socialist state side by side with a capitalist economy. It’s really going to be a touch and go situation for a decade. And it’s not reversible. It doesn’t matter who becomes president here or who replaces Fidel.

It’s really almost tragic, because, to survive, you have to almost devour yourself, or to allow yourself to be devoured. That’s the tragic paradox of life in that part of the world. It’s history, too. History is so profoundly corrupted by colonialism and slavery that getting out from under that shadow is very difficult. It doesn’t matter if the government is of the left or the right. Look at Venezuela, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti. It’s still somehow crawling out from under the weight of 300-400 years of dominance by colonialists and empire and slavery. It’s not something where you say, “Let’s start over again.” It’s the shadow you carry deep in the culture for hundreds of years. Even today in the U.S. we are dealing with the residue and aftermath of 300 years of slavery and racism.

With regard to Cuba, sitting for six hours with Castro, I asked him, “Is there anything you regret?” He did say he regretted having trusted the Russians. I thought that was funny at that point. The other thing he said is that he thought the revolution would eliminate racism, but he said, “Look. Everyone in a position of servitude and at the bottom is black, and everyone in power looks like me, is white. It’s there in every respect, and it makes this country extremely vulnerable to exploitation by tourism.”

You mentioned racism in the U.S., and I’m reminded of what you said once about “the old American weave of violence, politics, religion, race.” What do you make of the current political moment and the race for president?

I was pretty confident in my observations earlier this year — and many pundits in the news media were, too — thinking that Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump had no chance to last beyond [last] July or August. Here we are in the following May, and both Sanders and Trump are tapping into something that people didn’t realize was there – profound anger and dissatisfaction with how political life in America has operated for the last half century.

With Trump, that anger takes one form, and it’s another form with Sanders. With Trump, it’s mostly a racist and nativistic form, and with Sanders, it takes a more radical leftist, Socialist form. In both cases, they are dealing with populist anger, and they are being carried on a wave of it, tapping into it. I for one didn’t realize it was there.

The most interesting political moment of my lifetime right now, in the U.S., is what is happening here in terms of domestic politics. What unfolds over the next six month is very telling and will reveal a great deal about what will happen in next 25 years. I am waiting with baited breath, anxiety and excitement and interest at the same time. I can’t say I anticipated it.

I occasionally write for Libération and Le Monde, and they think I am very smart [in France] because I predicted in 2006 that Obama would be our first black president. They thought I was prescient. I wrote through the fall and winter about the American political scene for these magazines. I predicted Hillary’s takeover of conventional moderate to conservative republicans, and I predicted that there would not be much difference between the two as the campaigns unfolded. I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I read somewhere that you said that any book, when it is first published, is forced to fit into the gestalt of the moment. What is the gestalt of the moment? Where and how will your “Voyager” fit into it?

It’s very hard to know. With fiction, novels and short stories, at this point in my career, I can kind of anticipate how it’s received. I know when I have written something that seems controversial that it will be received with difficulty, restraint or enthusiasm. With this book, I can’t predict anything. I haven’t any idea how it will resonate out there in the world. I do think this though, that it’s a book about a man in his 70s looking back over his life, which includes the ’50s and ’60s and on, which has got to be true for every Baby Boomer in America. Especially men. We are the generation whose childhoods were in the 1950s and adolescences in the 1960s, and now we are in our 70s, and we can’t help but be aware of our mortality, and we can’t help but look back over our lives — our options are so diminished and limited. We can’t start over again. Our fantasies and dreams have to be accommodated to inescapable reality. We have that growing awareness of age and mortality and the past and the importance of the past and the historical past. I hope that is how it will be read. That would be satisfying to me.

You have likened travel books and memoirs to guilty pleasures. Now that you’ve written one, do you still?

Travel books still engage me. When I say guilty pleasure – when I say travel books, I’m talking about guidebooks, not Paul Theroux. I’m talking a Lonely Planet guide to Ecuador. They are fantasy trips for me. It’s fantasy travel. You read the list of hotels in the Fodor’s and think, I wouldn’t mind staying there. It’s something that people who like sci-fi or fantasy experience – it is that it takes them out of their life in a harmless and unchallenging way, and it’s an interlude and a restful one, and I read them with that in mind.

Russell Banks is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections of short stories, including “Affliction,” “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Continental Drift,” “Cloudsplitter” and “Rule of the Bone.” He is a past president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 20 languages and has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He lives in upstate New York and Miami, Florida.

Readers! Ask Russell Banks questions of your own! Banks will read from and discuss “Voyager” at Harvard Square Books on Monday, June 6.

]]>Affliction," "The Sweet Hereafter," "Continental Drift," "Cloudsplitter" and "Rule of the Bone." Pictured: Cover excerpt from "Voyager" by Russell Banks. (Ecco and HarperCollins/Courtesy)]]>2016-06-03T18:59:03-04:00Too Many Dead: The Need To Reframe Gun Violence As A Public Health Issuehttp://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/03/gun-violence-as-a-public-health-issue-sandro-galea
http://cognoscenti.legacy.wbur.org/2016/06/03/gun-violence-as-a-public-health-issue-sandro-galea#respondFri, 03 Jun 2016 09:00:51 +0000http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/?p=34432Is it too much to hope that America may be nearing the point of progress over the urgent — and long overdue — issue of gun violence? More than 5,000 peoplehave been killed by guns since the start of this year. More than 10,000 have been injured. There have been more than 112 mass shootings. Just this week, a murder-suicide claimed two lives on the UCLA campus. In 2013,the U.S. saw more than 30,000 gun-related deaths. There’s cause to believe that 2016 will see a similarly horrifying tally.

Children are particularly vulnerable to gun violence. Kids living in this country remain at a disproportionately high risk of being accidentally killed by a firearm compared with their peers in other parts of the world. Indeed, the very presence of guns in households appears to create the conditions for a deadly outcome. A 2013 study found that U.S. states with higher estimated rates of gun ownership experienced higher numbers of gun-related homicides.

None of these data should be acceptable, yet, for many years, we have accepted this status quo as an inevitable state of affairs. Anti-gun safety activists succeeded in setting the terms of the debate, even convincing Congress in 1996 to pass a budget provision stating that no funds given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” This has stymied efforts to gather data about the full extent of the problem.

But that might not be the case for much longer.

Last week, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, along with 12 other U.S. state attorneys general, addressed a letter to leading members of Congress requesting that the federal government let the CDC do its work. Specifically, they asked that Congress repeal the provision denying funds to the agency for the purpose of gun research. Their letter states, “We strive to keep legal guns safe, illegal guns off the street, and sellers in compliance with the law. CDC-funded research…would enhance our ability to do that very work.”

In addition to stressing how this research would be a boon to law and order, the signatories took care to highlight how gun violence is very much a public health concern, and might therefore be mitigated by public health solutions. “Analysis of prevention measures, such as intervention and counseling by healthcare providers and gun safety improvements, as well as research into the root causes and psychology of gun violence are needed to inform our response,” they wrote.

In this call to action we see a familiar pattern. Data have amply proven the damage done to our society by guns. Now, with state attorneys general joining the chorus of mothers, veterans, celebrities and physicians — not to mention 67 percent of Americans —whosupport a saner approach to gun ownership in this country, there is a real chance to reclaim the narrative. Increasingly, the call for regulation is viewed not asa threat to Second Amendment rights but asa good faith effort to resolve a pressing public health crisis while fighting crime, keeping our children safe, andrespecting the rights of responsible gun owners.

The current lack of gun violence data is, in many ways, one important piece of this puzzle. More than two decades ago, the rate of motor vehicle fatalities prompted a public health push and safety awareness campaign to reduce them. In 1993, “Click it or Ticket,” the seatbelt campaign, was born. Whereas only 15 percent of Americans used a seatbelt in 1984, by 2007, that number had increased to 82 percent.Motor vehicle deaths fell from 42,000 in 1997 to 34,000 in 2013.

By harkening back to this earlier public health success, the U.S. attorneys general give advocates of gun safety hope that America can yet curb the seemingly intractable problem of gun violence.